Currently, passengers of autonomous vehicles have no way to identify the actions the autonomous vehicle will take when a potentially hazardous obstacle, such as a pedestrian, vehicle, animal, or any other obstacle, is detected in the path of the vehicle. Furthermore, autonomous vehicles lack visual indicators to alert passengers that the vehicle is planning on changing speed, stopping, or performing another driving maneuver. This can sometimes build anxiety for the passengers because they do not know what will happen next and also they do not have a way to change the default decision made by the autonomous vehicle. In short, it would be advantageous if there was a way to indicate or convey to the passengers sitting inside the vehicle the next steps that the autonomous vehicle is going to take.
As autonomous vehicles evolve, there is a possibility that autonomous vehicles will not even have a steering wheel in it, so there wouldn't be an option to override autonomous vehicle's decisions. However, the autonomous vehicle itself provides alternative decision options to the passengers keeping the safety in mind, and thereafter, if passengers were able to select those alternative decisions to override vehicle's default decisions, then that would be really helpful, however, such above mentioned feature currently does not exist.
A similar situation to above is that if there was no road or a big ditch in the upcoming path of the autonomous vehicle, however, in case if the autonomous vehicle's default decision was to still proceed on that path, then currently the passengers of the autonomous self driving vehicles do not have a way of knowing what actions or next steps the autonomous vehicle would take until that action is taken. At the same time, the autonomous vehicle passengers also currently do not have a way to change the default decision made by the autonomous vehicle. However, if the passengers were able to select alternative decisions to override vehicle's default decisions, then that would be really helpful, however, such above mentioned features currently do not exist in the autonomous self-driving vehicles.
According to already existing patents granted, autonomous vehicles will indicate to the outside pedestrians about the actions that the autonomous vehicle is about to take. However, there is currently no feature within the autonomous vehicles to display the next steps or actions that the vehicle would take to the passengers sitting inside the vehicle. Also, there is currently no option for passengers to override the autonomous vehicle's default decisions by selecting the alternative decision options that are presented by the autonomous vehicle itself by keeping the safety in mind.